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Scipio Africanus was a great Roman general. He was the man who bested Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, at the Battle of Zama. In addition to being a great general, Scipio was a great politician. Then as a now, you did not get a chance to be a great general unless you were very good at politics. Politics being what it is, even the great Scipio had his enemies. For example, the warmongering lunatic Cato the Elder, the neocon of his day, accused Scipio of corruption, after he had retired from public life.

One of the ways Scipio navigated his way through the political system was by showing the Roman public he was a man of great piety. He showed his filial piety by risking his life to save his father’s life, when he was wounded and surrounded by enemies at the battle of Ticinus. Later, he volunteered to take command of the army of Spain, even though it was not a glamorous position, in order to follow in his father’s path. Scipio also made sure the public saw him making sacrifices to the gods and conducting himself with great probity.

The point of this, is that it is a natural part of civic life, for the rulers to make a big show of their honor and morality. As in the case of Scipio, public acts of piety are an important part of the political process. They signal to the public and the political class, that the person supports and defends the codes of society.There is the civic code, which defines the political life of society. Then there is the moral code, usually religion, that defines the daily life of the people. The shrewd politician is careful to make sure he is good at both.

This works out well when there is a commonly held religion, even in a very general sense like Christianity. A century ago, an American politician was expected to be seen going to church, for example. He would salt his language with references to the Bible and religious teaching, in order to signal that he was a good Christian. Of course, it was also important to have a unifying set of civil customs. A century ago, most Americans agreed on a set of beliefs, that constituted being a good citizen, Politicians signaled them as well.

Today, we live in a post-Christian age, where most of ruling class is unfamiliar with traditional religion and often hostile to it. Instead, our rulers believe in a grab bag of fads that define multiculturalism. Political correctness is the enforcement arm of this amorphous new faith, so signaling agreement with the current PC causes is how our rulers try to tell us they are moral people. People hoping to rise into the upper ranks, invest all of their time in public acts of piety, often on-line, to prove they are worthy of admission.

Similarly, there is no agreed upon civics. Instead it is a collection of mystical chants based loosely around the concept of democracy. In the cosmopolitan globalism of our age, there is no longer the concept of citizenship, so it is impossible to appeal to our patriotism and civic duty. Instead, our rulers invest their time worshiping undefined things like “our democracy” often using the same language of the prior era. The difference is, “our way of life” meant something, while “our democracy” means pretty much nothing.

The thing is, those old sets of codes had limits built into their definitions. One was pious, in the Christian sense, as long as you lacked the sins common to most men. There was no level beyond pious and even the most faithful man was always tempted. Perfection was not an option. Similarly, civic pride had a natural limit. You were a good citizen, as long as you lacked the things associated with being a bad citizen. In other words, piety was not about what you had, it was about what you lacked, with zero being the natural limit.

In the new religion, there is no limiting principle. It’s utopian nature encourages the adherent to seek the next step, the next higher plane of piety. Twenty years ago, being nice to homosexuals was a sign of goodness. Then embracing the homosexual lifestyle was the next level of piety. Then civil marriage then marriage and now we have people demanding school boys wear sundresses. Since multiculturalism is, by definition, the nullification of culture, there’s no limit to how much one can hate their own society.

That’s the other thing that makes the new religion so bizarre and erratic. There is no well defined promised land to this utopian cult. They talk about equality, but in the vaguest terms. There’s no standard of equality against which we can measure progress. There’s just the demand for more equal. The same is true of justice. There’s no definition of the concept, which is why it most often sounds like vengeance. No matter how much the despised group does, it is never enough. “We can always do more” is the only rule.

Reality is the natural barrier between the fanatics and their desired utopia. Their inability to to reach the promised land, however, does not cause them to reconsider the project. Instead, they re-double their efforts, staking out even more bizarre positions. Thirty years ago, homosexual marriage was a punch line for popular comics. Today, laughing at those jokes gets you thrown in jail. Just take a moment and consider what comes after the compulsory acceptance of transvestites. The new religion moves quickly.

I’ve been asked a number of times about my thoughts on the paper produced by someone calling himself Nathan Cofans, examining Kevin McDonald’s theories on Jewish exceptionalism. I had skimmed it prior to last week’s epistle to the anti-Semites and gave a good read the other day, with the idea of treating it as a serious set of arguments. Going back and re-reading it, I kept thinking that it was not produced with the goal of expanding the stock of human knowledge or with the goal of shedding light on McDonald’s claims.

Instead, I kept getting the image of the abbot, marshaling his monks to craft the latest defense of the faith and the realm. I was never a big Moldbug fan, but he picked a good word when describing the prevailing orthodoxy as a “cathedral.” It’s not so much that it is an accurate label, but that it conjures the right sort of image. The people in charge of us, have a set of beliefs that serve as a secular religion, justifying their actions and their position. They respond to challenges the same way the Church responded to heretics.

The two people behind this orchestrated campaign to denounce the heretic McDonald and his followers, are a member of the clerisy and a novice. Jonathan Anomaly is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. His novice, Nathan Cofnas, is a graduate student at Oxford. They have collaborated on this article at Quillette, which is mostly a way to promote this long critique of Kevin McDonald’s book, The Culture of Critique, which has become the textbook of modern anti-Semites.

The reason for describing Anomaly and Cofnas this way is for accuracy. If you work in the academy, you must defend the orthodoxy. In the West, particularly America, universities are theological centers, more like madrassas than places for open debate. If an academic starts talking frankly about observable reality, especially when it comes to the human sciences, they are either committing career suicide, headed for retirement or having a breakdown. Honesty gets even the best scholars hurled into the void.

Cofnas is working his fingers bloody promoting his paper on social media, even getting into slap fights with defenders of McDonald. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is clearly an elaborate effort to counter-signal the alt-right. He has written for legacy-right outfits like The Weekly Standard and National Review, so it is safe to assume he is hostile to modern right-wing movements. Again, there is nothing wrong with it, but it means we should not treat his paper as anything other than polemic on behalf of his team.

Now, I’ve already said I am a skeptic of Kevin McDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy. It could be brilliant, but it could be nonsense too. In the human sciences, it is a good idea to be cautious of bespoke theories that define one very narrow set of observations. A million years ago, John Derbyshire hit the nail on the head when he wrote that “There is a whiff of teleology about this whole business.” It’s intelligent design, except the Jews themselves were the designers. That strikes me as implausible.

With all the caveats, qualifications and disclaimers done, what about the Cofnas paper?

The first thing worth noticing is under the second section, titled “Jewish High IQ and Geography” where he posits an alternative theory for Jewish achievement. He points out that the concentration of Jews in urban areas may be the missing piece of the puzzle, with regards to the over-representation in intellectual endeavors. This is not a new idea, but it is something McDonald ignored in his argument. The error Cofnas makes is in declaring it the “default hypothesis” as if it is manifestly obvious or accepted science.

This is the sort of intellectual base stealing that McDonald would point to as an example of Jewish cultural habits. It also strikes me as signalling. The point of doing it early in the paper is to let the people in charge know who is on the side of light in this thing. This is one of the central themes of neo-reaction. Debate is not an argument about facts and reason, for the purpose of discovering truths. Instead, it is about defending the dominant orthodoxy, which supports and legitimizes the people currently in power – The Cathedral.

The other thing that struck me is that Cofnas falls down the same hole we see all the time in modern political debate. He defines Right and Left as a debate over hustling commas around the tax code. That means a “right-wing” movement like libertarianism is the flip side of some left-wing movement like Marxism. It’s also how you end up with Adolph on the same side as Von Mises. The conventional political scale is not a reflection of intellectual reality, but a rejection of it in favor of defending the current liberal order.

A point that cannot be made enough is that America has been dominated by the Yankee ruling elite since Gettysburg. As a result, our politics have operated entirely within the sphere of Progressive orthodoxy. After World War II, this extended across the West as the American empire imposed its cultural norms onto the provincial ruling elites in the territories. In America, Progressives have had a long lovers quarrel with themselves, in the form of spats between conservatives and liberals, Democrats versus Republicans.

This is why the paper amounts to nothing more than a laundry list of picked nits and mindless hairsplitting. This scene kept coming to mind. Cofnas is a young person trying to please his masters, so he is going to great lengths to prove he has studied the material, by offering up an exhausting list of granular criticism. That’s probably a good career move, one that anyone familiar with the Imperial Examination System would appreciate. Fans of McDonald, however, will see this as confirmation of their beliefs about Jews.

Does Cofnas “debunk” McDonald, as he claims?

Not in the least, as far as I can see. That’s mostly because he never bothers to take on McDonald’s central thesis. Instead, he nibbles around at tertiary arguments in an elaborate effort to counter-signal. That’s most likely the point of the exercise, so he probably achieved what he set out to achieve. He is a young defender of the faith and will be given a post on the walls, lending his credentials to de rigueur arguments at legacy publications like National Review and The Weekly Standard. The Cathedral has another guard.

Some weeks, putting together this podcast is a pleasure. The topics are easy and the process is smooth. Other weeks, it is a grind. This week it was a grind. This is not my full-time job, so events can conspire against me. That’s to be expected. Some weeks, the material is the problem. That was an issue this week. The news was either depressing or dull and I just could not come up with alternative material that I found interesting.

Put the two together and it was pushing a rock up a hill. Every segment took longer than it should and the result was something less than inspiring. That’s why we have five short segments and three long ones this week. I was tempted to just throw in the towel and skip this week, but there’s something to be learned from struggle. You learn some things about yourself or the process that you would not learn otherwise. That and life is struggle.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. Of course, the Hitler Phones are so slow now, you may never finish. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

When I was a boy, my grandfather would tool around in his car listening to big band music or classical. The former was the music of his youth, while the latter was what he thought sophisticated people liked. He was not wrong about that. In his youth, the kind of music you could dance to was for proles, while the sophisticated people appreciated classical and opera. It was not as clear cut as that, but the early 20th century was a time when people still looked up for guidance and inspiration. That included entertainments.

The thing I always hated hearing from my grandfather was how modern music was terrible and not fit for civilized people. He was a man of his age and class, so he used colorful euphemisms to describe popular music. Even as a kid, I understood that every generation has their soundtrack. Maybe never having known anything but a world where pop culture dominated, this came naturally to me, while my grandfather still recalled an age before everyone had a radio and television. Maybe he knew things I couldn’t know.

Either way, I’ve always just assumed that once I passed my mid-20’s, pop music was no longer for me. Some stuff would be appealing, but most would be aimed at kids and strike me as simplistic and repetitive. There were some good bands in the 90’s that I liked, but most of it was not my thing. By the 2000’s, I was unable to name popular groups or the songs at the top of the charts. Today, I have not heard a single note from any song on the current top-40. On the other hand, I’m sure I’ve heard some version of all of it.

That may be why music sales have collapsed. A 15-year old can go on YouTube or Spotify and find fifty versions of the current pop hits, gong back before their parents were born. They can also find stuff from previous eras that was remarkably well done and performed by people with real talent. Justin Timberlake may be very talented as a singer, but no one is confusing him with Frank Sinatra. It’s simply a lot easier for young people to see that pop music is just manufactured pap from Acme Global Corp.

That’s another thing that may be plaguing pop culture in general and pop music in particular. When I was a teen, your music said something about you because you felt a connection to the band. In the sterile transactional world of today, no one feels an attachment to anything, much less the latest pop group. There’s no sense of obligation to buy or listen to their latest release. Supporting a type of music or a specific act is no longer a part of kid’s identity. The relationship is now as sterile as society.

That is the funny thing about pop culture in our Progressive paradise. It is a lot like the pop music of totalitarian paradises of the past. The Soviets manufactured their version of Western pop, but it was never popular. Just as we see at the Super Bowl, comrades can be forced marched to an arena and made to cheer, but no one really liked it. There’s a lot of that today, as every pop star has the exact same Progressive politics and uses their act to proselytize on behalf of the faith. That’s not a coincidence. It is by design.

The West does not have a competitor that embraces freedom and liberty, so the past has become the competition. Look at YouTube and you will see that old songs and bands have enormous amounts of traffic. Given that the people who listened to Sinatra in their prime are mostly dead, it must be younger people discovering and enjoying the old stuff from when the West was still in love with itself. I’ve often been surprised to see young people, particularly young men, into music that pre-dates me, but it is not uncommon.

As an aside, I include music clips in my podcast, mostly to break things up, but also to entertain myself with inside jokes. The number one question I get from people is about the music. Every week I get e-mails asking about some clip and the e-mail is always from a younger person. If I use a clip from an old crooner, I get compliments from people of all ages. Nostalgia certainly plays some role, but most of it is people looking for enjoyable music, because the current popular music just don’t work for them.

What’s happening to pop culture is a reflection of our age. We’ve been turned into Pandas by a smothering, soft totalitarianism. The feminization of the culture means we’re ruled by mothers, who refuse to ever let us wander from the nest, physically, spiritually, creatively or intellectually. That has had all sorts of effects, like the drop in sperm counts and the collapse of popular culture. A deracinated people, kept in adult daycare centers and tended to by belligerent spinsters is not going to have a lot to celebrate or live for.

The great philosopher Homer Simpson said, “Why do you need new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It’s a scientific fact.” There’s a lot of truth to that as per capita music sales peaked in the 70’s and began a decline until CD’s forced everyone to repurchase their music. But that peaked in the late 90’s and there has been a precipitous decline ever since. Two factors driving it would be demographics and the fact that our most musical people, blacks and Jews, no longer play instruments.

Pop music is not art, but like art it does hold a mirror up to society. In the heyday of pop music, the society it reflected was one that was optimistic and happy. Today, the society it reflects is the gray, featureless slurry of multiculturalism and the vinegar drinking scolds who impose it on us. It’s not that it is low quality or offensive. It’s that the music is a lot like the modern parking lot. It is row after row of dreary sameness. Like everything in this age, popular music has the soul of the machine that made it.

There was a special election to fill the seat for Pennsylvanian’s 18th congressional district yesterday and it appears the Democrat has won. The district had gone for Trump by 20-points in 2016, but the lackluster baby boomer the Republican Party put up could not be bothered to campaign, much less notice the issues important to the voters. The Democrat, on the other hand, sounded more like Trump on most issues, than his own party. He was lying, of course, but people will vote for a liar over someone who appears to hate them.

The Democrat candidate claimed a congressional election in a Republican heartland in Pennsylvania, as a vote seen as a referendum on Donald Trump’s performance as president remained officially too close to call early on Wednesday.

n an ominous sign for Republicans eight months before national midterm elections, official results with all ballots from voting booths counted showed moderate Democrat Conor Lamb leading conservative Republican Rick Saccone by a fraction of a percentage point.

Trump won the Pennsylvania 18th Congressional District that they are contesting by almost 20 points in the 2016 presidential election.

With TV networks, which often call U.S. elections, yet to predict a winner, officials were continuing to count several hundred absentee ballots to try to determine the result.

Democratic sources said that, once those ballots were included, they expected Lamb to have won the election by more than 400 votes.

“It took a little longer than we thought but we did it. You did it,” Lamb, a U.S. Marines veteran, told cheering supporters late on Tuesday.

Speaking before Lamb claimed victory, Saccone – who has described himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump” – said the contest was not yet over.

The Democrats are looking to replay what they did in 2006 where they rounded up a bunch of reasonable sounding people to run in Republican districts. Voters, revolted by the GOP, were willing to give the reasonable sounding Democrats a shot. It was a cynical ploy, but what made it important was the shamelessness. Usually, political parties scheme to fool the voters behind closed doors. In 2006, the party was right out in the open about what they were up to and they laughed about it afterward to their friends in the press.

It’s why this coming midterm is probably going to follow a different course. For starters, the Democrats that are winning are doing so in opposition to their own party. Conor Lamb ran around saying nice things about Trump, while the Republican sounded like every generic Republican the voters have come to hate. The Left will want to pitch this as a referendum on Trump, but really what’s shaping up is a referendum on the GOP establishment. They do nothing but foot drag and obstruct the Trump agenda.

It’s also a warning to the Democrat leadership. Their coalition of fruitcakes is an unreliable voting block. You’ll note thus far that they have won these special elections by appealing to white voters, not left-handed bisexual trannies of color. Conor Lamb sounded like Democrats used to sound in the 1950’s, talking about bread and butter issues in a language normal people can understand. White people will vote for a person who is pro-white, regardless of party. That’s a lesson the Washington elite has yet to learn.

The thing is though, the establishment of both parties is locked into a model of politics that belongs in a museum, rather than a modern campaign. The old Left-Right framework is no longer relevant. Within the white vote, the issue is nationalism versus cosmopolitan globalism. The establishment of both parties continues to operate as if the politics of gesture is still salient. They still play the Fukuyama end of history stuff, where all the big issues have been decided, so what’s left is pointless gestures and meaningless symbols.

Phase change in politics is a slow moving thing as the people being phased out never come to terms with their own fate until it is just about sealed. The generation of politicians running both parties are creatures of the previous era. They evolved to fit that era and in many respects, they are the perfection of that era. The best politicians of any age usually reach perfection just as they are no longer needed. That’s America today. We have a political class perfectly designed for 1992, but utterly useless for our current era.

What this means is a period of contentious and contradictory elections, as the voters and politicians try to figure out what works. In the demographic age, democracy can only evolve in one direction and that’s people voting their skin. This is the lesson of history and the inevitable result of biology. Baby boomers are, for the most part, locked into the civic nationalist model. Younger generations are adapting to the new reality. Audacious Epigone sorted this out after the 2016 election. Hope lies in the actuarial tables.

Imagine if science stumbled upon a set of genes that are almost always present in the criminal population. After testing thousands of prisoners, they find a set of genes in more than 90% of them. In the rest of the population, the genes appear almost only in those who have a criminal record. In other words, the correlation between the presence of these genes and criminality is so high, there has to be a causal relationship. That would be an enormous breakthrough and lead to a rethinking of criminal justice in the West.

Now, we know the racial makeup of the prison population in the US. We know blacks commit an enormous amount of crime relative to other races. The likely result of that genetic breakthrough would be the end of nonsense like this. The debate over black crime would quickly move from magic spells and evil spirits to biology. Inevitably, the presence of the crime genes would be vastly more common among blacks than other races. The question facing public policy makers would be how to use this information to reduce crime.

Now, this is unlikely to happen, but it is a useful way to think about how reality can be useful in forming public policy. In the fanciful example above, the result would be changes in how we view crime. Just as people have to accepted the fact homosexuals cannot help themselves, that they are driven by biology, people would come to accept that some people are born bad. The difference would be that efforts to address this genetic “defect” would seem completely moral. Compassion would dictate finding a cure for black crime.

It is important to remember that compassion does not have a universal and timeless definition. A century ago, the compassionate response to poverty was discipline from the upper classes, along with highly conditional charity. Even New Dealers thought paying people to loaf around was monstrously immoral. Yet today, asking a man to work for his gourmet coffee and XBox subscription is considered heartless. The point being, public morality changes and it usually changes in response to new generations.

The reason America has urban reservations full of useless black people is the rich people in charge of us ran out of ways to fix things like black crime and poverty. They simply got tired of shoveling the sand of egalitarianism and the blank slate , against the tide of biological and racial reality. The great cultural revolution that started in the middle of the last century was not the liberation of blacks and women, as is always claimed. It was the liberation of rich people from their duties to the lower classes and society as a whole.

Slowly but surely, science is creating an alternative toolkit for addressing the problems that vex modern society. There’s a reason that columns like this one are written by people with no math or science. Gavin Evans is an aging cleric for a church with empty pews. No serious person embraces the blank slate, even though it remains taboo to discuss in public the realities of biology. In fact, the shrillness of the vinegar drinking scolds is entirely due to the fact they are on the wane. They have to shriek in order to get attention.

Stories like this are becoming more common and as such people are increasingly comfortable with biological explanations to social phenomenon. Progressives still recoil in horror at the mention of science, but that’s mostly true of the older Progressives. The actuarial tables are not on the side of biology deniers. The younger generations are increasingly comfortable with genetic and statistical reality and that means the ruling class will become increasingly comfortable talking about public policy based on reality.

None of this means the ruling class is going to suddenly swing in the direction of race realism. That’s not how culture changes. Instead, morality moves like an infectious disease. A new challenge to an old moral code spreads slowly at first and then reaches critical mass. Similarly, the antibodies react in a defensive effort to ward off the new challenge. Right now, science is viewed as a mortal threat by the Progressive host, so their reaction is extreme. That means ruining careers as a way to scare dissenters.

In time though, the new generation takes up their positions and they have adapted to the new morality. All the boys are girls following sportsball through statistics and figuring out how to sell more stuff to left-handed cross-dressers on-line will have no problem thinking about crime as a biology problem. Using mouth swabs to determine that little Jamaal has less than 2% chance of going to college will sound smart. Designing an education system for little Jamaal so he can be a warehouse worker will be compassionate.

Ultimately, it will be compassionate, relative to the benign neglect we see today. Take a ghetto tour through a place like Baltimore and you see a world that should never exist in a Western country. Less than a long lifetime ago, it did not exist. It was not allowed to exist by the people in charge. The black ghetto is loud, chaotic and sadder than anything you will see in modern America. It should never have been allowed to get this way and it should not be allowed to persist. It will never be fixed, but it can be better.

The only way it gets better is to start where this post started – biology. Poor people of all races are poor because they make bad decisions, they have poor impulse control and they have lower IQ’s than the rest of the population. You can’t fix nature, but you can put structure around it to mitigate it. Poor people, especially poor black people, need rules, not choices. Allowing people to suffer at their own hands is no more compassionate than allowing a depressed person to jump off a bridge. It’s indifference, not compassion.

Once you accept the fact that biology is real, things like mandatory birth control for poor people on government assistance makes a lot more sense. Shaniqua can’t figure out that she should not have ten babies. She lacks the intelligence to think through these things. She can figure out that getting her EBT card charged up means not getting pregnant, so she will willingly sign off on Norplant. By the morality of the legacy generation, that seems monstrous. To the morality of the next generation, that will be the height of compassion.

Similarly, “fixing the schools” will always be an easy racket for grifters, but in a world of biological realism, it will be impossible to pretend that Jonquarius will one day be a computer programmer. The education reform of tomorrow will be about training 85-IQ blacks how to do something useful and avoid the obvious pitfalls of life. More important, no one is going to be deluded into thinking the black underclass will join the middle class. It’s that compassionate racism will set different objectives for the moral reformer.

From time to time, I am approached by an anti-Semite hoping to convince me to join their thing. Most people, of course, think antisemitism is a bad thing, the worst thing, but anti-Semites think otherwise. Recently, a person calling himself Lawrence has showed up in the comment section of my YouTube channel and here on the blog, inviting me to join the world of antisemitism. Given some posts related to this topic are in the queue, I thought it was a good time to respond to this generous invitation to become an anti-Semite.

First off, and this cannot be stressed enough, I don’t think antisemitism is a great sin. I once worked for a guy who hated Greeks. Anything wrong in the world, according to him, was the fault of the Greeks. He was a bigot, of course, but as far as I knew he never caused anyone harm, not even Greeks. He was just a weirdly eccentric person, who had unusual opinions about the world. In the grand scheme of things, there are many worse vices a man can have, than a bias toward another group or a race of people.

Here is my favorite way of explaining this to people puzzled by my indifference to the great crimes of antisemitism and racism. Imagine someone moving into the house across the street. You find out that the new neighbor is an anti-Semite. Now, imagine a second neighbor moves in and you learn he is a methamphetamine dealer. Which neighbor troubles you more? Only a nut would say the anti-Semite is the bigger worry. The point is there is a very long list of things that are worse than holding negative opinions.

Now, as far as my opinion on antisemitism, I must admit I have a negative view of it, just as I have a negative view of racism. The mistake people like Lawrence make is in thinking that race realism is the same as racism. If I were a racist, I would not live among black people. I can be quite realistic about the nature of blacks, without holding black people in contempt. In fact, I have a great deal of sympathy for black people. The reason for that is I am well aware of the biological reality that underlies the plight of blacks in America.

Similarly, I am a realist, with regards to Jews in America. I’ve written quite bit on Jewish exceptionalism. I did a long podcast episode examining the alt-right’s arguments on the JQ. I’ve written critiques of Jewish social customs. I’ve had debates in the comments sections here with Jews about Jewish issues. Hell, I stood in a room full of Jews once, explaining and defending the humor of Andrew Anglin. The point is that you can discuss, even as a non-Jew, all the issues involved in the JQ, without being an anti-Semite.

Now, many anti-Semites have encouraged me to “take the red pill” on the JQ so then I would come to appreciate what antisemitism brings to the party. The claim is that once you accept the biological reality of Jewish subversiveness, then antisemitism fits like a glove. I generally assume to this to mean the theories of Kevin McDonald, the retired professor of psychology, who wrote the book Culture of Critique. John Derbyshire called him the Karl Marx of antisemitism, which is turning out to be prophetic.

Well, I have read Kevin McDonald. I think he makes an excellent case against Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Frankfurt School critical theory. In fact, his arguments against these intellectual movements should be required reading for anyone trying to understand how things went so terribly wrong in the West. Further, there is no disputing his observation that these movements were dominated by Jews. In fact, all of the monstrous ideologies of the last era had an over representation of Jews.

The truth is though, Jews are over represented in everything that requires a high level of math and verbal skill. Every intellectual movement since Jewish emancipation, that was not explicitly anti-Semitic, saw an over representation of Jews. Intellectual movements tend to attract intellectuals. They also tend to be located in urban areas, especially urban capitals in Europe, where Jews have always lived. Therefore, no one should be surprised that Jews are over represented in left-wing political and cultural movements.

The main argument of McDonald is that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy” engineered to promote Jewish interests at the expense of the host society. He argues that Judaism promoted eugenic practices favoring high intelligence, conscientiousness, and ethnocentrism, so Jews reached the late Middle Ages with these qualities in extraordinary surplus. Once Jews were allowed to participate in Western society, they were uniquely equipped to dominate intellectual movements, turning them to Jewish advantage.

While admitting that is perfectly plausible, it has always struck me as a bit like intelligent design. This unique tool kit for undermining Western society evolved for the purpose of undermining a Western society, that only came into existence recently. In fact, this group evolutionary strategy came pretty close to getting all European Jews killed half a century ago. Jewish dominance today is entirely due to America opening up the country to Eastern European Jews at the start of the last century. Apparently, Jews really plan ahead.

The bottom line, with regards to Kevin McDonald and the general idea of Jews being a hostile and subversive people, is that it could be true. It could also be true that Jews have followed the pattern of all minority populations and gravitated to the people in charge, seeing them as protectors. In America, that means Yankee Progressives, who have, in one form or another, dominated the country since Gettysburg. Jewish intelligence and high verbal dexterity means they have come to excel in left-wing movements.

As you can see, I’m well acquainted with the arguments and I’m not instinctively hostile to most of them. Like everyone with some knowledge of human evolution, I’m a bit skeptical of group evolutionary strategy. It could be a real thing or it could be nonsense. There was a time when people thought phrenology was a real thing. Within my lifetime smart people were sure you could be talked out of insanity. There have been a lot of nutty fads in human sciences, so skepticism is a prudent position until more data comes in.

Obviously, my resistance to antisemitism is not based in ignorance of the material or fear of the morality police. The real issue for me is that anti-Semites taste Jews in their sandwich. They are like a man who has only mastered how to use a hammer. He sees every problem as a nail. In the case of anti-Semites, everything is blamed on the Jews to the point of absurdity. It seems to me that in order to be an anti-Semite, one has to commit their life to it, like joining the priesthood or a religious cult. It must define one’s life.

While I bear no ill will to those of you who have become anti-Semites, I just don’t think it is the place for me. My group evolutionary strategy, as it were, is to enjoy the fullness of life, even the parts that are not so good. Obsessing over Jews all the time seems like a waste of time. If there comes a time when I have to obsess over Jews all the time, then I’ll do what I must, but for now, I have lots of other things that interest me. No hard feelings and I wish you luck in your business, as long as it does not interfere with my business.

Neocon Youth League leader Noah Rothman unleashed a screed the other day, calling for war upon the people he describes as “outnumbered losers.” These are people the rest of us know as Americans. For the increasingly shrill and deranged neocon cult, anyone clinging to the outmoded concept of citizenship is a useless loser. The post itself was mostly boiler plate cosmopolitan globalism, but his tweet promoting it made it sound like he wanted to genocide the white population of America. Here’s the tweet.

We often hear about how globalism's losers and malcontents need to be understood and mollified, but they are vastly numerically inferior and lack the firepower their opponents possess. Why don't we just defeat them? https://t.co/0Bs8ZU6TJt

As Steve Sailer pointed out, this sounds like a call to marginalize the tens of millions of Americans that hold opinions Rothman does not like. It has that “through any means necessary” smell to it you see with radicalized crazies. When this was pointed out, Rothman did what these guys always do when they face resistance, which is play the victim card. It’s the same cry-bully act the cat ladies employ. They always start talking about the backlash, after they have aggressively applied the front lash.

As I pointed out the other day, these people are playing with fire. What a Rebecca Klein is doing is creating people with no choice but to become a guerrilla, at war with the system that dispossessed them. What Rothman is proposing to do is de-legitimize wide swaths of political opinion, and thereby exclude the people who favor those opinions. He’s proposing to make half the country enemies of the faith. That’s how you end up in a world of car bombs and targeted assassinations. That’s not a world for soft men like Rothman.

This is something I’ve noticed about all radicals. It is those in the greatest need of protection by the system, who are the most inclined to abuse the system, by turning it into an instrument of terror. Using the media to have political opponents driven from their positions is sort of thuggery we associate with autocrats. Internal exile, where someone is allowed to live in their community, but is shunned out of fear of association, was a feature of Russian totalitarianism. Authoritarians always enjoy the support of the weak.

In the case of the neocons, there is also what appears to be a genetic predisposition to duplicity. The whole project was kicked off by men who were dishonest even by the standards of communism. Run off by the Left, they connived their way into Buckley Conservatism, passing themselves off as a newfangled form of cosmopolitan conservative. Now that the Right has finally figured out it was a con, and they are in need of a new host, these people are retooling their scam as classical liberals.

Maybe it is just monkey see, monkey do, but there really does appear to be a level of coordination on this front. Ben Shapiro is fond of passing himself off as a classical liberal, all but claiming direct ancestry to the Founders. Jonah Goldberg likes wearing the beard of classical liberalism. As we saw when they infiltrated mainstream conservatism, the neocon project begins with subtly undermining and co-opting the host. They are now hard at work redefining classical liberalism to be multiculturalism with a tricorn hat.

Before anyone starts howling about antisemitism, liberal Jews in America have always been astonishingly honest in their political dealings. Bernie Sanders, for all is faults, is not trying to fool anyone about who he is and what he advocates. At the same time, Jews in paleo-conservatism have been the most strident in opposing the neocons. What we’re talking about is a weird Jewish sect with roots in the old Russian Empire. I’ll note that Noah Rothman was a Russian Studies major and often wakes to the sound of hoofbeats.

Paul Gottfried appears to be right that this eternal hostility to the host is a peculiar feature of some Eastern European Jews.This talk he gave at the Property and Freedom conference on the subject is worth the time. I would add that it appears that these people have developed an identity that is negative. It is based on having an eternal enemy against whom they wage a holy war. The Soviets filled that role for a long time. Then it was the Muslim radicals for a while and now it is the population of their host nation.

Another element of this is the suicidal instincts of the neocons. In many respects, they resemble the twelver cults, in that they believe they must live their lives in order to bring about then end times. You get the sense they are itching for a confrontation with Russia, because they are hoping for nuclear war. Similarly, the agitation and provocation we see in the Rothman column suggests they are trying to conjure an antisemitic backlash. In the absence of hoofbeats and shattering glass, they are without purpose and identity.

Lucky for them and for us, antisemitism has never been part of the American culture. In fact, most white people find it ugly and vulgar. That’s not likely to change, no matter how many people read Kevin McDonald’s books. Instead, contra Rothman, it is the neocons who are being overwhelmed and neutralized by a rising tide of demographic realism and economic nationalism. Cosmopolitan globalism has been tried and found wanting by the vast majority of Western men and is slowly being yanked out by the root.

Every man has his foibles and one of mine is a love of symmetry and continuity. I like when things fit a pattern and I like when things fit together. I spent a lot of time as kid watching the tide come in and the tide go out. The beauty of it has always stuck with me. Little waves inside of larger waves inside the great cycle of the tides. There is an order to universe and there should be order in our work. Orderliness is next to godliness.

It pleases me greatly that this show fits neatly around one theme. Granted, it is a very general theme, but the universe is a very general place. Even finding a small bit of order, in the most general way, means I have found oneness with the universe. It will not bring order to your life, or bring sanity to the word around us, but this podcast has a unifying theme and that makes me happy. Small victories are the bread of life.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. Of course, the Hitler Phones are so slow now, you may never finish. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

One of things I wish I was better at doing is answering questions sent by readers and now listeners. I have an e-mail address tied to this site, but I don’t look it often enough, so I tend to be late in getting back to people. Then there are the questions that come through the comment section of YouTube and through social media. In an effort to clean up my act I have been trying to catch up on all of it and I noticed I get a lot of questions about writing and the task of writing. It’s a popular topic, apparently, so I thought I’d make a post of it.

It’s good timing, as I have started to go through my posts here looking for ones to pin to a greatest hits link on the site. This is a very common suggestion, so I’m working on that now. That means re-reading five year old posts, which has been edifying. I started this blog with the idea of doing no editing, just a stream of consciousness sort of thing, but that did not come out well. Looking back, I appreciate the terribleness of the effort even more, as I have evolved a style that seems to work pretty well for me and my audience.

That brings me to the question I get a lot and that is, how to be a good writer. I don’t know the answer to that as I’m not sure you can be a good writer in the objective sense. I like certain styles more than others, but that does not mean the styles I don’t like are the result of bad form. I could have weird tastes. My hunch is “good writers” are those who have figured out a style that works for them. It allows them to efficiently get across to the reader, the points they are trying to make on the subjects they find interesting.

Most likely, the only way to do that is write a lot. Looking over this blog, I see that I have slowly, through trial and error, developed a style that I like reading. It took a while and some of my ideas turned out to be wacky, but for the last couple of years I have stuck to a form and method that I find easy. This has corresponded with a rapid growth in readership, suggesting that I have found a style that works for me. I find it easier to write now than at any time in my life, so I suspect getting “good” means finding what works for you.

On the other hand, I’m a different reader than I was five years ago. Until I started posting every day, I never thought too much about writing styles. When I did start thinking about it, I became a different reader. I also started reading much more and much more variety. I have read books and articles on a much broader range of topics that in the past, mostly because I’ve become curious about writing styles. Writing a movie review is a different task from writing a short story. Different jobs mean different skills.

If I were giving advice to a young person, who wanted to make a career writing, I’d probably tell them to read for a few hours each day, but never read the same type of material two days in row. The thing I’ve come to notice about the popular writers I don’t like is they are blinkered. I get the sense that they are not very curious about the world. Maybe that’s the key to being an enjoyable writer, a healthy curiosity. Or, maybe it is just something I enjoy. It’s hard to know, but reading is always its own reward.

A related question I get a lot, concerns the writers I mock from time to time. The reason I make sport of people like Kevin Williamson is not the content, so much as the lack of candor. I like opinion writers who write their own opinions. For me, the best writers are those who are smart, honest and clear. Over the last few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that Williamson is none of those things. I never liked George Will for much the same reason. Will is a ridiculous phony and I have no tolerance for phonies.

On the other hand, one of my favorite writers ever was the late Christopher Hitchens. I doubt I agreed with any of his opinions, but he always struck me as someone who said what he thought and did so in a way that made it easy to understand. He was also a well read and smart guy. He just happened to believe a lot of insane things about the world, but he was a extraordinarily good writer. I never read a Hitchens piece and thought he was trying to fool me or he was simply writing for a paycheck. That counts for a lot.

Clarity is probably the rarest thing in writing, so I really appreciate that in writers. I’m re-reading Greg Cochran’s The 10,000 Year Explosion and I marvel at the clarity. These are hard topics, yet Cochran has a way of getting to the point that makes the material easy to understand. Getting to the point is the key. I’ve never understood why anyone wants to be a windbag. My advice to any writer is make your point and move on to the next point. If you need to keep returning to the point, maybe you don’t know the material.

Finally, a question that comes up often is why I pick the topics I pick every day. Maybe there is some pattern here that I don’t see, but my selection criteria is quite elaborate and complex. I sit down and whatever comes to my head at the moment, is the topic for the day. I like writing in the morning, so whatever I woke up thinking about that day is the topic of the day. Basically, I write about what I feel like reading about at the moment. Usually, I don’t find much out there, so I write what I wish I could be reading.

Until just now, that’s not something I thought about much, but my bet is the really good writers stick to a style and focus on subjects they like reading. I’m a Faulkner fan, having read everything he wrote, and that’s what always struck me about him. He wrote with himself as the target audience. Hemingway wrote to impress people, but Faulkner wrote to entertain himself. In the fullness of time, Faulkner will be remembered as one of our greatest writers and Hemingway will be remembered as a boorish clown.